Blog #1

I am Jingyi Yang, and I prefer people to call me Yoki. I’m from Beijing, China. This is my fourth year in Uvic and my 10th year in Canada. I am about to graduate at the end of this year. I’m a psychology major.

There’s no way to avoid social media in today’s online environment. He has made people’s lives favourable and unfavourable. It also adds a lot of fun. Through social media, people can see and receive new things and news from all over the world faster. Social media can also make it easier for us to learn. People no longer need to go to a specific school and sit in a classroom to learn something new. People can now just turn on their computers at home and start learning at any time that suits them. These are the things that interest me and that I like most about social media.

It’s become completely impossible to live without digital media in my personal life. Both in school and in my personal life. In school, teachers conduct lectures using PowerPoint and the first website that requires access to various lectures. In our psychology classes, many teachers will find relevant videos on Youtube to help us understand better. I really like these videos because specialized classes are quite boring and it would be more interesting if there were videos. Also, it is very important for us to use various social and digital media when we are doing group work. We use a variety of social media to connect with each other a lot of the time. If we need to have a meeting but we are in a different part of the world, we also use software like Zoom that allows us to have video and voice chat to communicate better. Digital media is even more indispensable in an individual’s daily life. We use a variety of social media to communicate with our friends on a daily basis. Many of my friends, including myself, use multiple social media outlets, such as Instagram for posting nice photos and TikTok for watching funny videos.

For me, eBooks are one of the most effective and useful digital literacy tools I’ve found. When I first started college, I preferred to use paper versions of books because I felt like I needed to use a pen and write in order to feel more like I was learning and be more focused on my studies. It wasn’t until later that I discovered electronic versions of books and some note-taking software that allowed me to write. E-books are usually available on the bookshelf of the platform where you buy them or you can just highlight and take notes. After discovering these digital media, I never used paper books again. I feel that these e-books make it more convenient for me, such as by reducing the weight of my school bag, and I can take them out anytime and anywhere for reading and reviewing. So I think the best impact digital media has had on education is that it has made teaching and learning easier.

My personal experience with PLNs was the various online classes I took in school before. Just like this class, there are no specific class times for these classes. I really like this type of class because it allows me to organize my time more conveniently and wisely. Personally, I find my schedule of classes within my major to be very intense, so I have very little time and energy to spend on and offline for electives and classes that interest me. In this course, we are also using some personal learning websites. This is the first time I have posted a blog and completed a study assignment on a personal website. I had a lot of difficulties when I first created this site, so I still want to continue to research and learn how to use PLNs better in subsequent courses.